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Sunday, January 30, 2011

Some Kind of Meat

I knew for all these years that there was a reason I always avoid eating at Taco Hell, er, Bell. Sure, you get cheap "Mexican" food but it's cheap because I've long defied anyone to tell me what that thimbleful of brown crumbles in the bottom of that desiccated taco shell really is.

It appears it's water, "binder and fillers" and I kid you not: "isolated oat product". Do Matthew McConaughey and Sam Elliot need to sue someone? Because apparently beef isn't for dinner, lunch or breakfast at Taco Hell.

Binder and fillers? What is that? Factory code language for cow testicles and Minnesotan for Spam?

Why are the oats so lonely? Isolated? What the heck does that mean? Grown in an urban farm away from the asphalt?

And Taco Bell has the cojones (hey, that's what it is!) to be righteously indignant over the lawsuit filed recently about the lack of actual beef in their meat? On what basis are they upset? Now they have to publicly admit it's crap? (hey, is that the filler?)

Don't think outside the bun, think about eating somewhere else. Here at Amentior we may indulge in foods that are loaded in fat and probably are not good for your cholesterol and heart but we like to think that when we eat poorly we eat quality unhealthy food!

Monday, January 24, 2011

Japan's 'convict' monkey stages daring cage break

Lucky
AP - TOKYO – A marauding monkey that terrorized resort towns in central Japan last year by biting nearly 120 people has escaped captivity.

Officials in Mishima City said the monkey slipped out of the government-run nature park it had been kept at since its capture last October when a keeper was cleaning its cage.

The city published an emergency notice urging residents to lock their doors, though no new attacks have been reported.

The fugitive monkey, known as "Lucky," is a type of macaque that is one of the most common wild mammals in Japan. They are considered a nuisance in rural areas, where they damage crops and steal food.

Lucky has proved a tough catch in the past, avoiding citywide monkey hunts during its previous two month biting spree.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Spider Monkey’s New Look

Anthony Di Fiore
Anthony Di Fiore, a primate biologist at New York University, writes from Ecuador, where he is using GPS technology and camera traps to study the behavior of male spider monkeys.

Wednesday, Jan. 12
Success! After three days of following the spider monkeys waiting for a perfect opportunity to capture a male, we finally got our first chance. Now Poto, one of the oldest males in our main study group, is outfitted with a new high-tech collar that combines a traditional radio transmitter (which will help us find and follow him more regularly when we have a telemetry receiver with us in the forest) and a data-logging GPS unit (which uses satellites to pinpoint and record its location and will let us collect data on Poto’s ranging patterns, even when we are focusing on other individuals). These collars are one of the new tools we’re using to study male cooperation and competition among spider monkeys.

 
Using telemetry equipment from a canopy tower.
 
In most places where they have been studied, male spider monkeys move farther and faster each day than females do, and they typically use more of the group’s entire home range. By contrast, females spend most of their time in their own smaller “core” areas, which may overlap with those of other females.

Spider monkey biologists think there are several key reasons for males’ peripatetic habits. First, males wander over their own group’s range to regularly visit females and check out their reproductive status. (Are those females pregnant? Do they still have a dependent offspring? Or are they sexually receptive and maybe looking to mate?) Second, males cooperatively engage in defense of the group’s range (and the set of females that use it) by traveling together on long patrols of their territory boundaries. They also sometimes raid the territories of adjacent groups. During patrols and raids, when males from another group are encountered, a raucous and sometimes violent showdown usually occurs...

http://www.nataliedee.com/011811/hello-weird-little-guy.jpg

Natalie Dee

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Trump Says He Will Run for President

By Ronald Kessler

http://www.ktfmediagroup.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/donald-trump-picture-1.jpg(NewsMax.com) Billionaire Donald Trump is telling friends he has decided he will definitely run for president as a Republican.

Trump will make the announcement when his NBC show "The Apprentice" finishes the season in the spring, he is confiding. He has been soliciting recommendations on political advisers, focusing initially on the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary. Trump declined to comment.

In October, Trump said on Fox News' "Fox & Friends" and on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that he was thinking about the possibility of running. In an interview from Scotland, where he has been building a golf course, Trump expanded on his comments to Newsmax, saying that "the world is laughing at us" and the United States is now “a punching bag for the world.”

It is “sad what’s happened to the country,” Trump said. “We’re no longer a respected nation, and we should be the most respected.”

According to a Newsmax/SurveyUSA poll conducted Nov. 3 and 4, in a head-to-head race between President Obama and Trump, the entrepreneur would get 47 percent of the vote, versus 53 percent for Obama.

Trump polled strongly among Republicans and conservatives. He got 50 percent of the votes of independents.

Understandably, many are skeptical that Trump would actually run. He has toyed with the idea before and is now at the pinnacle of his real estate career.

At his New Year's Eve party at Mar-a-Lago, his home and club in Palm Beach, he clearly was enjoying his celebrity, shmoozing with Regis Philbin and Rod Stewart in between dances with his stunning wife Melania.

But Trump has told friends he believes Obama is a "disaster." An advocate of a strong national security, he becomes livid when he talks about the decline of America compared with other countries like China.

“I look at the jobs numbers, and I see what’s going on in China, where it’s booming," Trump said on Fox News. "You know why it’s booming? Because they’re making all our products.They’re taking all our jobs. We are rebuilding China, and our country is going to hell.”

Sumo Robot Wars are Fast Like Ninja

Ninja-Sumo-Robots? The future of humankind looks grim indeed.

In the western world, the word “sumo” paints a mental image of two tubby giants slapping each other silly until one of them either falls or is driven out of the ring. You’d think that this lack of speed would translate to the robot world, until you watch the video below:


Yes, it was over in seconds, and no, that footage wasn’t sped up. The robot participants of the 2010 All Japan Robot Sumo Finals, held December last year, are more like ninja than sumo. They're so fast you’d miss them if you blink. In fact, the match you just saw was completely autonomous (and real-time), as no human being would ever keep up with these super-sped-up machines.

Let’s hope they don’t decide to enter real sumo competitions, or those fat guys won’t know what hit them.

[source: FSI All Japan Robot-Sumo Tournament via BotJunkie]